HomePod Siri on HomePod called one of my customers at 2AM

[brentsg]

Last night I was having a late night talk with my son. Nobody spoke to Siri but she decided that not only had she been summoned, but that we wanted to call a critical customer. I heard her say “Ok calling …” and as we desperately tried to stop her she would tell us that she can’t do that while I’m on a call.

It was really bizarre and unfortunately my phone wasn’t even on the same floor so he got the call that woke him.

I am ready to forgo the calling feature but I can’t figure out if this is even possible. If not, I’ll probably scrap the HomePods (x4 OG). I know this is a rare thing but I can’t have it happen again. The craziest thing, when I try to use this feature she usually can’t do it for various reasons.

 

[Puonti]

I'm assuming this was a regular phone call, not a FaceTime call. On your iPhone, go to Settings -> Phone -> Calls on Other Devices.

If your HomePod is listed there you can toggle it off so that it won't use your iPhone to make calls.

 

[brentsg]

I looked at this last night. I have "Calls on Other Devices" set to OFF. However I use this feature all the time so this clearly doesn't affect the HomePod, just iPad and similar.

 

[Puonti]

Looking into it some more, it appears phone calls through HomePod are handled via "Make personal requests on HomePod". I didn't find any information how you could disable just phone calls, though. It looks like it might be all or nothing:

Use HomePod for phone calls

Use HomePod as a speaker phone to make and answer calls.

support.apple.com

 

[waw74]

siri seems to be a bit hard of hearing the past few weeks, her failure rate for me keeps going up.

I asked her for a homekit scene through my headphones and she's like "calling ____ _____" and the names in no way sound similar to each other. at least it was daytime, but I couldn't get the phone to hangup, and I really didn't want to talk to that person.


I don't have hard evidence, but I seem to remember this happening every year about this time as they start putting betas of the next major version out. not sure if they start doing server upgrades which negatively affect the older versions or what's happening.
happens on both my phone and homepod

 

[boswald]

You know, now that you mention it, I had a similar strange event happen to me a few months ago. For whatever reason, Siri decided to call my best friend at 4 AM and say "Good job, man!" Thing is, I wear a CPAP machine at night, so talking is all but impossible, especially when I'm sound asleep. I seriously doubt I took my mask off, leaned over the bed, told Siri to call him, put my mask back on and go back to sleep.

 

[gwhizkids]

You know, now that you mention it, I had a similar strange event happen to me a few months ago. For whatever reason, Siri decided to call my best friend at 4 AM and say "Good job, man!" Thing is, I wear a CPAP machine at night, so talking is all but impossible, especially when I'm sound asleep. I seriously doubt I took my mask off, leaned over the bed, told Siri to call him, put my mask back on and go back to sleep.

Siri actually spoke on a phone call?

 

[boswald]

Siri actually spoke on a phone call?

I don’t think she did. She might’ve called him in the middle of the night (for whatever reason) and picked it up from somewhere. I have no idea how it happened. He won’t let me live it down though.

 

[brentsg]

Yeah Siri is really bad right now.

She tried to help my wife make a call yesterday on the main floor HomePod. Today she jumped into a conversation I was having on my cell and tried to help me find an appliance repair person. It's nuts.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I feel awful for you OP, but I have to admit I was laughing out loud reading your original post..

My first few nights with Homepods were "enlightening"...I ended up having to totally disable most all the "smart" stuff for similar reasons.